One day, it is not going to be like this

nettle soup, fragility, food systems, and what comes after convenience

This started as a late post about tech trouble and spiraled into something else entirely: a meditation on systems we trust too much, from devices to strawberries in February. It’s about our normal and what happens when our comforts shift. My wife once said, “One day, it is not going to be like this,” and she wasn’t being dramatic. She was just early.

And there’s a recipe at the end. It’s simple.

TL;DR

• some stuff about food, ecosystems, food systems - kinda philosophy-ish

• there’s a nettle soup recipe. It’s good.

“One day, it is not going to be like this.”

My wife said it softly in a Brooklyn supermarket, not like a warning, but a like a weather report.

It’s cloudy today.

Our food systems rely upon conditions that are not at all sustainable.

both seem a bit obvious once you say them out loud.

It was a hipster grocery near our apartment - with bulk bins, goji berries, turmeric shots, and at least five kinds of salt while someone nearby was inevitably talking about their gut biome.

It’s an oddly small place, so the different sections of the market are harshly juxtaposed against one another. It’s also a bit steampunk in its sense of food - these are organic, healthy options, but they’re based on junk food too.

There were brightly colored juice boxes, but ones that advertised Organic and Natural. The beverages had Origin Stories on the label. A lot of labels telling you, in narrative form, just how Honest ad Good and Real they were.

I think we were standing by the nut butters when she said it, oppostite the produce section fulled of organic fruit from California, Florida, Ecuador, Kenya, and maybe New Zealand .

This small place had a global reach.

Shorter supply chains are, in fact, one of the many reasons that we would up in France, which has one of the shortest in the world.

the pork deal

Avoiding factory-farmed, chemical-laced food in the US can turn into a mild obsession. We met farmers. We grew our own. We foraged

One winter morning, I met a heritage pig farmer at a rest stop in Connecticut and nervously handed over cash for a side of heritage Hampshire pork, half expecting cops to roll up on what looked like, from a distance, a large drug deal. Up close, it looked less like a food transaction and more like an exchange of unmarked body parts.

but at least I knew where my food was coming from.

“One day, it is not going to be like this.”

She said it in a different store. We hadn’t talked about it much the last time.

this time it was Long Island Suburbia: shiny aisles of cartoon-colors, rows of edible things, not food exactly, but fuel with flavor. Crayola-palette liquids. Protein bars. Everything in metalicized plastic.

The lighting exaggerated the colors: fluorescent lights, but the good ones, neat shelves.

I don’t remember what we were shopping for, but I remember the tone. Not panic. Not despair. Just a recognition: this all has an expiration date.

And she was right, of course.

It already has.

It already had.

It never breaks all at once. It’s not a switch. It's a leak. A sagging. A quiet, accumulating shift in the baseline.

You realize the strawberries taste like nothing - and you can’t remember the last time they did.

It’s an adjustment to the old normal, the idea that cheap coffee is normal, our basic list of readily consummable monocultures was what should always be, because it was familiar.

You only see the bend in the road when you're past the hinge.

One day, it is not going to be like this.

This was well-documented yesterday.

In April, China’s exports to the U.S. plunged 21% year-over-year after tariffs as high as 145% took effect. Its trade surplus with the U.S. shrank from $27.6 billion in March to just $20 billion in April. In response, China redirected shipments, boosting exports to Southeast Asia (+20.8%), Latin America (+17%), Europe (+8.3%), and Africa (+25%), lifting total exports by 8.1% over the same period.

Meanwhile, container bookings from China dropped 60%, with U.S. port arrivals expected to fall 35%. The Kiel Institute now forecasts a 17% drop in U.S. exports and a 5% decline in imports—widening the trade deficit further.

The US will not win a trade war with China.

Your food will be changing.Our food has already changed in many places.

I should write more about this kind of thing - if you’re at all interested in more like this, let me know—I’m still trying to make sense of it myself.

nettles. all soften bits can be cooked and eaten

eating locally

Which brings me to nettles.

They grow fast and kind of everywhere.

they belong here, a least in France.

They sting, yes, but only until you cook them.

This week, I picked some at the edge of a path near the Loire. They were just out of reach of the mowers, but they willl grow in all kind of conditions and soils. Tough survivors, thriving where most things wither.

And you should eat them.

They’re one of my favorites because they are so simple and so useful. If you would put spinach in it, stinging nettles/ortie will work very well.

Like spinach, a huge amount cooks down to very little.

---

Mémère dans les orties Juliette & François Morel (2022)

Mémère dans les orties is a clever little French chanson playing on the idiom “pousser mémère dans les orties” (literally, to push grandma into the nettles - to do something unnecessarily cruel or provocative). With clever lyrics and playful delivery, a cabaret-style little samba-esque number about verbal meanness is really quite sweet.

It is amazing how many songs there are about les orties in France, and in just about every genre from chanson to jazz to rap.

---

Recipe: Simple Nettle Soup

this is a simple, adaptable recipe. Nettles are easy to find, once you start noticing them and if you harvest them without gloves, you might wish you didn’t.

France has many nettle recipes, but nettles most go uncollected here. It can be used cooked, put into smoothies (blanche them first), teas, lotions, it’s an anti-inflammatory and has other medicinal qualities.

Very likely the reason it is all over this country is because it’s a very useful plant.

We’ve just stopped using it.

Forage

Pick a bag’s worth of young nettle tops (wear gloves). You want them to be soft enough so that you don’t have to take the leaves off the stems. If you’re really good, you can go near them with a bowl and just snip tops into it with a pair of scissors. No need for gloves.

But gloves remain a good idea.

after you’ve picked them, everything else is easy.

cook

Rinse well. In a pot, sauté one onion and two cloves of garlic in olive oil or butter. Add two peeled potatoes, cubed. Pour in enough water or broth to cover. Simmer till potatoes are soft.

Toss in the nettles and cook for five minutes more.

Blend - a stick blender is easiest.

Add salt, maybe cream, or yogurt or creme fraîche.

eat

It’s a lovely, simple soup that tastes like spinach and spingtime.

Eat with bread. Bowl and spoons are optimal.

That’s it.